TL;DR Growing Big creates overhead of communication and pulls teams apart. Leaders need to look out for people and processes to create an interconnected fabric among sub-teams.
Growing Big: A team can grow big in multiple dimensions
Size & Layers: In less than three years, my team grew from a team of 50+ engineers and researchers to a team of hundreds of engineers reporting to three pillars and more than three layers of leadership.
Functionality: As we grew, we also structured ourselves into functional groups where a modeling team was separated from infrastructure and experience (product UX) teams.
Specialization: We also have fewer and fewer people who traverse multiple disciplines (infra <> modeling/data). We are growing highly specialized talents to serve the pillars’ and teams’ specific needs. We incentivize our specialists to focus on their domains.
What remains unchanged? Our customers want the same thing from us: expert-quality services to get things done quickly.
Growing Apart: We started to observe the “being too big” behaviors manifesting in our conversations with our customers and among our teams. Some examples:
- Joint Convo: We used to have leadership cadence hosted by key leaders within our org to engage another internal org. The cadence helped us overcome some key relationship crisis among our partner teams. However, since then, each team has found a channel and contact points to talk directly to each other. We don’t bring back the discussion to a bigger team to share and align. As people stop contributing, the meeting has become less valuable. Later, we tried to gather the troop and got feedback that “It’s worth questioning if the meeting is value-adding, given that it was suspended for 4 months without any issue and requires a lot of high-level employees.” Should we cancel now and wait for the next crisis to re-group?
- Single Thread Solution: When teams come to our organization, they usually need to talk to three or four people and still haven’t gotten anything done.
- Let’s Cancel: We canceled joint cadence with key customers as everyone finds it more effective to talk to their customers in a smaller forum. We also canceled the sync among our internal teams and archived the internal collaboration Slack channel altogether. Cross-team communication channels have quietly disappeared and we barely notice. Communication only happens at the top leadership level.
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What would eventually happen if we did nothing? Let’s observe a real-life example and ask ourselves ‘What do such a big but disjoint org and Tesla Model 3 have in common?’
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An Analogy: Tesla Model 3 casting body can show us why the sum of greatness might result in poor build quality and production waste.
Sandy Munro is a manufacturing expert and founder of a benchmarking consultant company. In his YouTube Channel Munro Live, he examined Tesla’s build quality and gave multiple examples and criticism of Tesla’s poor build quality. Munro screenshot below is the early Model 3 build (the current 2021 model has improved significantly).
Munro criticized the rear part of the Model 3’s body to consist of ‘far too many pieces with far too many different fastening methods.’ Here is Elon Musk’s response:
“The organizational structure errors, they manifest themselves in the product,” he begins. “We’ve got probably the best material science team in the world at Tesla. Engineers would ask what’s the best material for this purpose…and they got like 50 different answers. And they’re all true individually, but they were not true collectively,” he admits.
“When you try to join all these dissimilar alloys…you’ve got gaps that you’ve got to seal, and you’ve got to join these things, and some of them need to be joined with rivets, some of them need to be joined with spot welds, some of them need to be joined with resin or resin and spot welds,” he continues.
“Frankly, it looks like a bit of a Frankenstein situation when you look at it all together.” Musk then talks about how sealing the gaps between the different pieces in the body is a nightmare. “That might be the most painful job in the factory, is spackling on the sealant,” he describes, mentioning how even a small error can cause leaks and NVH problems.
The problem goes beyond build quality. The multipiece rear body accounted for approximately 30 percent of Tesla’s body shop with 300 robots — yes, all that for just the rear body casting.
The natural follow-up question is ‘If you knew the problem, why didn’t you change it?’ Model 3 didn’t use a single casting design on the Model Y. Musk admitted that the shipping pressure and cash flow commitment were the main reasons: “It’s hard to change the wheels on the bus when it’s going 80 mph down the highway.” Since Model 3 accounts for a large portion of Tesla’s volume, they would probably blow up the cash flow if redoing the factory without proper planning.
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What do a big but disjoint org and Tesla Model 3 have in common?
- Organizational structures manifest themselves in products and customer services.
- 50 expert answers are true, but not correct collectively.
- Joining or bridging teams with no incentives to work together is like joining different alloys — it creates gaps and leaks, and it’s painful for whoever does that job.
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Recommendations:
- Create a single-thread mission for the organization
- Encourage sub-team collaborations via supporting functions such as TPMs, S&O, User Research to bring everyone together
- Nurture talents who can traverse the organization boundaries through rotations and education programs
